Over recent years, mobile phones and mobile PCs are mounted with a liquid crystal panel serving as a display device. The liquid crystal panel is provided with a polarizing plate. The constitution of a common polarizing plate is partially described briefly below. As shown in FIG. 7, a polarizing plate is provided with a polarizer and a protective film to protect it, and further on the protective film, a hard coat layer is formed. A hard coat layer is formed by coating a certain coating liquid on a protective film (followed by drying). Then, the protective film is bonded to a polarizer via saponification (alkali treatment using 2N NaOH).
In a polarizing plate provided with such a constitution, commonly, the thickness of a protective film is about 40-80 μm and the thickness of a hard coat layer is about 10-30 μm. In cases in which a protective film and a hard coat layer have such thicknesses, when a polarizing plate is bonded to a liquid crystal cell to form a liquid crystal panel and then the liquid crystal panel is cut as a whole, at the interface of the protective film and the hard coat layer, cracking may occur (refer to Patent Document 1). To prevent this possibility, when both a protective film and a hard coat layer are simply allowed to be thinner, there is produced such a disadvantage that when a polarizing plate is held in the roll state, wrinkles tend to occur (refer to Patent Document 2).